Burned by broken promises in first term, Obama curbs ambition this time

FILE - In this May 3, 2012, file photo, President Barack Obama walks from the Oval Office as he arrives to speak at a celebration of Cinco de Mayo in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington. Despite a relentless workload ahead, President Barack Obama is lighter on his feet in one sense as he opens his second term. Gone are the hundreds of promises of the past (many of which he never kept.) He’s toting carry-ons instead of heavy cargo this time. Failing to achieve a promised first-term overhaul of immigration law, Obama took stopgap executive action to help as many as 1.7 million younger illegal immigrants stay in the country, and now, after an election marked by Hispanic clout, finds the political landscape more amenable to trying again. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)

EDITOR’S NOTE — An occasional look at government promises and how well they are kept.

WASHINGTON — Despite a relentless workload ahead, President Barack Obama is lighter on his feet in one sense as he opens his second term. Gone are the hundreds of promises of the past. He’s toting carry-ons instead of heavy cargo this time.

Obama’s first presidential campaign and the years that followed were distinguished by an overflowing ambition, converted into a checklist of things he swore to do. The list was striking not only for its length but its breadth, ranging from tidbits in forgotten corners of public policy to grand — even grandiose — pronouncements worthy of Moses.

He made a sweeping vow to calm the rise of the seas. And a literally down-in-the-weeds pledge to aid the sage grouse and its grassy habitat.

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Obama worked his way through that stockpile, breaking dozens of his promises along the way and keeping many more of them.

Thanks to the messy business of governing, the president’s record on promises is not cut and dried. Some of his most notable flops, for example, contained seeds of future success.

Failing to achieve a promised first-term overhaul of immigration law, Obama took stopgap executive action to help as many as 1.7 million younger illegal immigrants stay in the country for up to two years. Now, after an election marked by Hispanic clout, he finds the political landscape more amenable to trying again.

Climate change legislation was another prominent broken pledge, but he came at the issue piecemeal, imposing the first regulations on heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming, setting tough controls on coal-fired power plants and greatly increasing fuel efficiency for cars and trucks.

Likewise, not all of his successes are all they were cracked up to be.

Yes, he achieved the transformational health care law, putting the U.S. on a path to universal coverage. But it remains in question whether costs will come under control as he said they would — and as the name of the Affordable Care Act implies. Obama swore a typical family’s premium would drop by up to $2,500 a year by the end of his first term, but they’ve continued to rise. That’s a broken promise tucked inside a kept one.

Yes, Obama is extricating the U.S. from wars as he promised before and after he became president, but what instabilities does he leave behind? And how many troops? His vow that, in 2014, “our longest war will be over” is on track to be true in the main, yet thousands of troops might stay indefinitely in Afghanistan as a residual force once the bulk of the 66,000 now there are gone.

His promise to raise taxes on the rich finally came to be at the bitter end of the last Congress, during the debate to avoid going off the “fiscal cliff” of severe spending cuts and steep tax increases that would have started automatically absent an agreement. He also made good on his vow to hold rates steady for everyone else. (The fine print: Households making $250,000 to $400,000 are off the hook from the higher rates. Obama had said he’d tax them more, too.)

As for falling sensationally short, the bitterness in Congress on display in that debate, and so many others, was to be swept away as part of the change Obama promised to bring to Washington’s ways and manners. Candidate Obama vowed to turn the page from “ugly partisanship,” only to concede that such a transformation was beyond his reach because “you can’t change Washington from the inside. You can only change it from the outside.”

If Obama can’t be held responsible for cantankerous lawmakers, though, it’s worth remembering that not all of the change he promised to bring to governance was centered on Congress. He also vowed to restrain the power of Washington’s special interests by barring lobbyists from serving in his administration, only to backtrack by issuing waivers and other exceptions to those new rules. That was strictly an “inside” job.

On another key promise, deficits have shot up, not dropped by half as he pledged in his 2008 campaign and again as president when the recession was raging. That inherited recession, the halting recovery and his heavy spending to spur growth yielded four straight years of trillion-dollar deficits.

Ahead? A far leaner list, but still a tough one to achieve.

In the 2012 campaign, Obama counted “comprehensive immigration reform” as the first thing he would do this year after the fiscal-cliff deal. Dormant for years, gun control is back as an issue because of the deadly rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary and took top priority outside fiscal matters. But a push on immigration is coming.

Among other promises from the campaign:

— Make higher education affordable for everyone. Obama said he’ll ensure by the end of the decade that the U.S. has more people with college degrees than any other country, recruit 100,000 math and science teachers in 10 years, help 2 million workers attend community college and seek to restrain the growth in college tuition by half over 10 years.

— Put government on a path to cutting deficits by $4 trillion over 10 years. That’s off to a rocky start. The fiscal-cliff deal represented a failure to settle on a plan to reduce the national debt, instead increasing both spending and taxes while putting off decisions on the big budget cuts that will be essential to bringing down trillion-dollar deficits.

— Cut imports of foreign oil by half by 2020. Once a pipe dream of a succession of presidents, a path toward energy self-sufficiency has become more conceivable thanks to a boom in domestic production.

— End subsidies to the oil industry. A failed promise from the first term, it’s given low odds of succeeding this time.

— Prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Obama has left open the possibility of military action if that’s what it takes to stop Iranian nuclear development. Meantime, he’s imposed stiff economic penalties on Iran to persuade it to cease uranium enrichment activity, so far without apparent success.

— ”Continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet — because climate change is not a hoax.” When Obama secured the primary victories needed for the 2008 Democratic nomination, he pledged that future generations would look back on that very night as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” At the heart of that was a pledge for strong action on climate change in his first term.

But legislation to cap emissions failed, without Obama leading a charge to pass it, and he all but stopped talking about the issue afterward.

Still, his administration began treating carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the law and steered billions of dollars into cleaner energy. The initiative could be revived in his new term, as an “obligation to ourselves and to future generations,” as he now puts it.

— Help factories double their exports, creating 1 million manufacturing jobs. It’s a tall order because manufacturing jobs have been declining steadily for nearly two decades.

— Consolidate a “whole bunch” of federal agencies dealing with business issues into one new department led by a secretary of business.

Altogether, it’s a more restrained to-do list than Obama produced for his first four years, when PolitiFact.com counted more than 500 Obama promises and found that 47 percent were kept, 23 percent broken and 25 percent ended in a compromise, with a smattering still in the works or stalled.

The sage grouse lucked out, gaining a Sage Grouse Initiative to give the species more grass cover for nesting. As promised.